Kind of random, I know, but I've spent the past few months working out all the different same direction phasings for antispin pentagrams. The end goal here is to get them down in toroids, but I figured starting here might be the low hanging fruit :) The funny thing is that all these phasings are really reflections of each other. If you think of each point skipped has having a number value to it, then 1 and 4 are identical save for the hand that is leading through the pattern. Likewise, 2 and 3 are the same except that the positions of the hands are reversed in each increment.

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This week we're tackling the Mt. Everest of inspin flowers: split time same direction. We'll use a similar approach to building this flower that we have in the other videos, but split-time variants require a bit more kinesthetic difficulty than any of the same time variations, so the road there is likely to be a little bit longer and take a bit more work. Next week: split-time opposites!

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A couple weeks ago, I posted a video of Arashi teaching a class at Firedrums and in it, I was struck by the fact that his "crane" atom had a strong resemblance to together-L in Maiki Nope's breakdown of atomic planes for clubs and poi. If this similarity bears out, it would mean in essence that there are 3 different atomics that can be spun from a variety of angles, depending on the perspective of the viewer. Atomic spinners: how does this gel with the world you play in?

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Over the weekend, e6 posted an awesome video exploring the toroid flower concept and really cleaning up some of the work with it to the point that the shapes are really reading and finding definition as something unique. It's inspired a lot of experiments this week, but I wanted to start with laying out all the four timing and direction combinations for these types of flowers. You can see Erik's original video here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bHsUwal8Ms0

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Erik (e6) made a request on the Facebook Tech Poi Group for those of us who regularly post tech blogs to post vids of what drills we happen to be playing with these days. Here are three drills that run the gamut of contact to plane-bending.

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Here's an attempt to tie together a whole bunch of different threads from some recent videos both myself and some others have made. First up, e6 posted a video over the weekend about timing and direction where he pointed out the difficulties in making the traditional T&D combinations work with flowers that have an odd number of petals. In an odd bit of synchronicity, Justin Benson posted a video displaying an example of just that--wherein he takes a pentagram into split opposites by creating two pentagrams that reflect each other across a given axis.

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A couple cool ideas based upon triquetra vs pendulum, which kind of fudges the triquetra pattern to create something more akin to two different flowers cut and pasted together. Here I take the same idea and apply it to triquetras and 6-petal antispin flowers to create a new composite and hybridize it both with another triquetra and triquetra's inspin equivalent: 1-petal inspin. Note to self: when recording a video on St. Patrick's Day, do the video before the drinking begins--otherwise I talk a record sped up to double speed :-P

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Last week Charlie posted a video to the Facebook Tech Poi Group of an 8-step CAP based in a 2-petal inspin vs 4-petal antispin hybrid. Having encountered this hybrid before when learning same time same direction hybrids from Yuta at last year's Firedrums, I realized that for any hybrid where you combine an inspin and antispin flower that have the same number of downbeats, they will maintain a constant timing and direction all the way around the pattern. Here are three examples in both same time same direction and split time same direction.

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I must have done at least a dozen takes of this video...there are a lot of ideas I wanted to cram in here and kind of sketch out the line of thinking that led me to each of the conclusions outlined here, but it's hard to do that inside of ten minutes. Ultimately if this doesn't make sense, let me know which parts specifically and I'll do my best to clarify in later videos.

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Yesterday I wrote about the many holes that had been poked in the theory of hybrid construction I posted a few weeks ago, among which are its incompatibility with any timings other than split-time or same time and the fact that it can't account for a static spin versus extension hybrid. Thus begs the question of how exactly we can define hybrids in a way that is extensible (ie, that works at any size shape we can image).